Category Archives: Age of Exploration

When I decided to publish my book on Christopher Columbus’s calamitous fourth voyage along with the Spanish translation as an e-book I faced formatting problems.

In the days when books were printed on dead trees the solution for presenting dual-language/bilingual books was to place the two texts on separate pages. Usually the original text was on the left-hand page and the translation was on the right. This method had its problems. First of all, the two different languages don’t always have an equal number of lines in a paragraph because of spelling and other differences so one page of text might be longer than the other which can be visually unappealing.

Another problem with the two-page method is that the reader is forced to switch pages in order to check their reading comprehension making it easy to lose one’s original place.

Using a split screen on a Kindle or other electronic reading device isn’t very practical or visually appealing. You can turn the text on a kindle so that the screen presentation is wider but now there are too few lines on what is now the vertical screen, and again the reader has to take their eyes of the main text to follow the translation.

My solution for eliminating that problem was to present the main text in BOLDFACE followed immediately by the translation in italics. Like this:

CHAPTER 1

The Old Man

CAPÍTULO 1

El viejo

I don’t remember how the old man, Juan, came to live with my mother and me. It seemed he had always been there. He was no blood relation of ours. Not that I knew of, anyway. He was simply there.No recuerdo cómo el viejo, Juan, vino a vivir con mi madre y conmigo. Parecía que siempre había estado allí. Él no tenía ningún parentesco con nosotros. No que yo supiera, de todos modos. Él simplemente estaba ‘allí.’

As a young child he scared me. It wasn’t anything he did. It was just him. Short of stature, tiny almost, his sun-weathered skin was wrinkled like a piece of dried up discarded fruit. He was forever hunched over. Even standing and leaning on the old piece of tree limb he carried with him everywhere he was never straight. His back was always bent as if he’d just spotted something on the ground and had stopped for a second to get a better look at it. When he’d been drinking he wasn’t just bent forward, he leaned to one side or the other, too. You could tell, looking at his arms, that he had once been very strong. The muscles still rippled under the faded designs permanently inked into his skin.De niño él me asustaba. No era nada por lo que él hiciese. Era sólo él. Corto de estatura, casi diminuto, su piel quemada por el sol estaba arrugada como una pieza de fruta seca. Siempre estaba encorvado. Aún de pie y apoyado en el viejo pedazo de rama de árbol que llevaba consigo a todas partes, él nunca estuvo erguido. Su espalda siempre estuvo doblada como si hubiera visto algo en el suelo y se había detenido por un segundo para obtener una mejor visión de ella. Cuando él había estado bebiendo no solamente se inclinaba ligeramente hacia adelante también se inclinaba de un lado al otro. Viendo sus brazos podrías decir, que alguna vez él había sido muy fuerte. Todavía se veían los músculos fornidos debajo de los diseños de tinta permanente en su piel.

He never combed or brushed his hair. It was blindingly white and what little there was of it grew in isolated spots on his head. It was as light and fine as dandelion fuzz and the slightest suggestion of a breeze would cause it to flutter nervously.Él nunca peinó su cabello. Era un blanco cegador y lo poco que quedaba de él creció en lugares aislados en la cabeza. Estaba como ligero y fino, cual la pelusa, como la flor de la planta del diente de león y que ni la más leve brisa lo haría agitarse.

His eyes were the darkest blue; like the color of the sea where the straight line of the horizon meets the lighter blue of the sky and it often seemed that he was staring intently at that distant line where whatever a seaman is looking for will first appear. And his large, hawk-like nose cleaved the sea of his face like a shark’s fin slicing through the calm waters inside a reef.Sus ojos eran del azul más oscuro, como el color del mar, donde la línea recta del horizonte reúne el azul claro del cielo y que a menudo parecía que él estaba mirando fijamente a esa línea lejana donde todo lo que un marinero busca aparecerá en primer lugar. Y su nariz grande, como la de un halcón, hendida en el mar de su cara como la aleta de un tiburón surcando las tranquilas aguas dentro de un arrecife.

He scared me, old Juan did, but that was when I was young. As I got older and he slowly revealed his story to me I grew to love the man and marveled at the adventure of his life. Él me dio miedo, el viejo Juan lo hizo, pero eso era cuando yo era joven. A medida que fui creciendo y poco a poco él reveló su historia, yo crecí con el amor del hombre y la maravilla de la aventura de su vida.

Juan would spend his afternoons at one or another of the taverns on the waterfront in the port of Cadiz below our house. I don’t know where he got the money to buy his wine but the old sailors, merchants and dock hands who worked along the waterfront always paid him some deference and bought him a cup every now and then. I had also seen him, once or twice, pouring the leftovers from someone else’s cup into his own when they left their tables to answer a call of nature. If he moved from one bar to another during an afternoon he was usually able to cage enough so he would be staggering as he climbed the small hill to our house in the evening. Juan podía pasar sus tardes en una u otra de las tabernas en el paseo marítimo en el puerto de Cádiz, más abajo de nuestra casa. No sé de dónde sacó el dinero para comprar su vino, pero los viejos marineros, comerciantes y los ensambladores de muelles, quienes trabajaron a lo largo de la costa, siempre le pagaban cierta deferencia y le compraban una copa de vez en cuando.Yo también lo había visto, una o dos veces, verter los restos de la copa de otra persona en su propia copa cuando dejaban sus mesas para responder a una llamada de la naturaleza. Si él fuera de bar en bar durante una tarde, usualmente podría guardar bastante, así que estaría tambaleante mientras subía la colina a nuestra casa por la noche

It was a rainy, early spring evening when my mother insisted I go down to the docks and fetch Juan back to the house for dinner. He and I stood in the doorway of the tavern looking out at the rain-soaked street and the caravels anchored in the river dreading the idea of having to leave the cozy warmth of the bar to journey into the cold night air when Juan mumbled, “It was just like this on the night I first met them.” Era una tarde lluviosa a principios de la primavera temprana, cuando mi madre insistió en que fuese a los muelles a buscar a Juan para la cena. Él y yo estábamos en la puerta de la taberna mirando hacia la calle empapada por la lluvia y las carabelas ancladas en el río, temiendo a la idea de tener que abandonar el calor acogedor de la barra para viajar en el aire frío de la noche, cuando Juan murmuró, “Era como ésta, la noche en que los conocí.”

As you can see it’s easy to follow the main text and if a reader wants to check if their comprehension is up to par the translation is right there without having to go to another page.

The book is available in two versions: English/Spanish (for Spanish-speakers learning English) and Spanish/English (for English-speaking readers studying Spanish) at the Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble, the Sony Store, Apple, Page Foundry.com and Baker-Taylor for $4.99.

However, I’ve decided to give readers of this blog a discount. First you have to sign up for an account with Smashwords.com. I know some of you might be reluctant to do that but I can assure you they DON’T give away your e-mail address and they DON’T SPAM YOU.

At Smashwords the books can be downloaded in a number of different formats:

For those of you who don’t own a Kindle, and iPad or any other “tablet” you can read the books by downloading the free app Kindle for PC or Kindle for Mac which simulated those readers on your home computer.